1915 (7 page)

“Terrible weather,” puffed her father. He studied the clock and made a decision. “If you'll bear with me I'll slip out for a minute and say hello to a colleague.” He joined the stream of brisk-walking men that flowed towards the Railway Hotel.

When he'd gone Walter heard himself say: “I'm pleased to see you again.”

She frowned: “I
did
see you at the theatre.”

“I don't mind.”

Somehow he'd said the right thing. Then she fired interested questions at him: asking about things he thought he'd covered during the cold night's trip to the coast — where their farm was, what his parents were like, even which school — no, she remembered. “But I do recall you don't like theatre.”

“No, I'm theatre-mad,” said Walter. He indicated his work-clothes: “Straight after the train I'm off to a show.”

“I've finished with school,” Frances informed him as they strolled with the train stretching ahead and the long asphalt pavement of the platform widening to the
darkness of infinity. “From now on I'll be helping Mother with her piano classes. Come and see us when you're down?” For a second her hand touched his arm, just lingering there. “I'll be running the little ones through their scales.” She played a tune on the brim of her hat, and with the help of her other hand danced the hat ahead, investing it with life. “I'd love to be interrupted.”

What would Billy have replied to this invitation?

“Then I'll come and interrupt you,” said Walter gruffly.

“Do,” she pleaded. “I want the whole world to come.”

Then she ran ahead to fetch pencil and paper from the compartment to give him the address, and at that moment Douggie and John decided to latch on.

“Hoi, Wally, what're you doing?” They swarmed like sly half-backs through a ruck of legs. John braked and stood with hands on hips, a miniature rooster: “Who's the
girl
,” he crowed. Walter grabbed him by the ear and twisted it till he squawked.

“I'm sorry.” Walter squatted. “Look, when you blokes get a bit older you won't make jokes like that. They get a fellow fighting mad.” He found a three-penny bit. “Here, get some lollies.”

“Thanks, Wal, you're a sport,” said John. But Douggie called back, “Hello Miss!” — Walter stood to find Frances standing behind him holding a piece of notepaper.

“You can come by ferry.”

The paper was the colour of butter: the colour of her hat: and the hat shone its buttery yellow onto her bare lower arm. So he folded part of her away when he slipped the note in his pocket.

“I don't know when it will be,” he shrugged. “Soon, I'm sure. Keep an eye out for me. What if I write you a letter?”

“I'd like you to. I like letters.”

“From the whole world?”

“Well, you could write,” she stated. And the words were so quietly inviting that she seemed to be saying, “From this part, especially.”

Walter just stared at her until she fiddled with her ribbon in embarrassment.

The whistle saved them: at its summons the stream of men flowed in reverse from the hotel.

“We're away,” announced Mr Reilly, “about half a minute to go.” He looked cheerily at the train, smelling of whisky.

Then Frances's hand was in Walter's: “Write?”

The guard was bad-temperedly slamming doors and Douggie called from farther down the platform: “
Waltah!
”

He remembered how Billy had looked, stranded on the platform. He stepped back in order to wave and watch for John at the same time. Frances and her father were framed for a moment in the window, a white figure and a black figure in a yellow square. After a second this picture dissolved and the figures swam away in a confusion of glass and varnished wood, their places taken by gliding mantles of molten light.

 

“I've got a message to deliver,” Walter told Douggie as they drove from the station to the Royal Hotel. There was no message, except what he now told himself: he had captured Frances's interest.

The barmaid remembered him: “It's Walter, isn't it?”

The rum shrieked at him and then changed its mood: embraced him fiercely, and rippled aside to regard him with soft kindness. He must have gasped at the start, because the barmaid laughed.

“Blacky Reid was here,” she told him. Walter should have guessed already. This was Blacky's lair. He imagined a smell, virulence reeking of motor spirit, and heard Blacky retelling the clash with his mother while his mates guffawed. At the end of these thoughts he was surprised to see only a splash of rum left so he asked for another. The spirits no longer bit: he read the name “Bundaberg” on the bottle and breathed the distant sugary air of Queensland.

She asked him why he was in town, and he found himself telling her about Frances. When he finished she said: “It's easy to see you're in love.”

“She's good looking,” he boasted.

On the way home the effects of the drinks wore off, leaving the events of the evening as sealed in as those of a play. Falling stars slipped from the sky one after the other, blinking out behind the dark heap of Mt Cookapoi. He made a wish to accompany each one:
Her
.

In the secrecy of his bedroom he scrutinized the note, holding it up to the hurting light of the lamp. Her touch had been dry as this paper, though underneath something had rippled like silk and skimmed the surface when their eyes met. Turning the paper edge-on (to find the night's code greeting him again: black, white, yellow) he saw faint hairs of fibre rising from the small furrow of her pencil-marks. She had written her name. Using his magnifying glass, the furrow
deepened to a ditch. It was like the dropped edge of a sand pile, only it never moved. Here he located the very instant when she had impressed her whole self in a line leading unvaryingly to him.

When Billy laughed these days and said, “I'm a bad bugger, eh?” he meant it. While he believed in God and, as far as he cared to notice them, the laws of the church, he saw himself standing off to one side. The laws were all right — he'd pay some day for breaking them — but for the moment they were for other people and got in the way.

Billy saw heaven as a place full of ladies from town dressed up as if waiting for the train. He saw Christ babbling on over their bent heads while they crept forward, all those old ducks, and tugged at the hem of his gown. There was nothing to be said to that weak and bearded figure. But if Billy could make contact with the Old Chap — he got on well with old men — he was sure the two of them would hit it off and get to the bottom of things. He wanted somewhere decent for his mother to go when she died. She'd like somewhere with a bit of grit in it. Why shouldn't she get a heaven right here among the paddocks and hillsides she loved? He wondered what would happen if he prayed at white-hot heat and asked God for a bargain. He'd do anything to make her happy. So as the church at the crossroads came into view and he cantered to catch up to his father he was impatient for the service to get started and that moment of blunt contact to begin.

“It'll be hot later,” he greeted Mr Gilchrist, then
clamped Walter by the elbow and urged: “Come on over and say g'day to the girls.”

Walter found himself in view of those “good sports”, Billy's cousins, puffing out his chest, hooking his thumbs in his belt. The cousins, sixteen and nineteen, with small chins, narrow chests, eyes as quick as pullets', glanced from one male to the other as if they had special food hidden about their persons. Then Ethel cocked her head to avoid the sun and bowled Billy a difficult question, something about “May”.

For some reason the query rang in the air like a shout.

“Who?” asked Walter.

Billy bit a fingernail and grunted.

“Someone in hospital,” Ethel confided.

At last Billy answered: “The police think it was the same shearer that pole-axed Albert Telford last Easter.” After saying “a funny show all right” he excused himself and joined his father, who had signalled.

Ethel wrinkled her nose as if at a bad smell. “A nurse at the hospital got followed one night and attacked.” She maintained the furrowed nose, but now seemed to be asking: do you think wrinkled noses are pretty?

Lottie pitched in: “The police quizzed Billy.”

The Reverend Fox and his wife stood to one side under a copious yellow box tree. As the worshippers filed past they shot the couple shyly curious glances.

 

“Merry Christmases” multiplied from pew to pew: the phrase increased until it became a murmur, releasing a flow of small talk that ebbed only when Mrs Fox fussed her way to the organ. The cousins after a
last peek around buried their hands in their laps feeling satisfactorily observed. The older women prayed by squeezing the bridges of their noses with thumb and forefinger, as if a root lived there that must be pinched to encourage the growth of the spirit. The prayer over, they took out raffia fans and cooled themselves rapidly. Where did the mothers go in these brief journeys? Walter had difficulty enough framing one clear hope from the many of his own that contended. But the women knew what they wanted.

Then he saw Billy at prayer also, and stared surprised at a thick yellow ear clutched devotedly in a red hand. The prayer went on and on through the neutral minutes of Mrs Fox shuffling sheets of music while bottoms made their last heaving adjustments, noses were blown, children silenced, knuckles cracked, yawns stifled. The varnished pews were already sticky. Then the corrugated iron of the roof gave a muffled thud as if God had knocked from above to say, “I am ready.”

Billy looked up with a defensive set to his features. He had been exposing himself to another's will. It was not so much a matter of pushing in his prayer for what he wanted as a placement of himself and his intentions across from the might-be's of a force yet to reveal its hand. Billy's mental stance was like a boxer's at the ready.

The youthful Mr Fox started the service by gripping the pulpit and exposing white knuckles. He chose a couple of people in the congregation and looked them in the eye: Billy, who tried not to poke out his tongue, Mrs Gilchrist, who fanned herself in reply with the strength of tight-wound clockwork, embarrassed that a man not much older than her son should presume to
seek out her soul. Then a child dropped a coin which gave out a long looping noise until the clap of a foot extinguished it. And just as throats were tickling and the impulse to clear them became irresistible, Mr Fox grinned mechanically, threw up his hands, and yelled:

“
Rejoice!
”

Ethel Mackenzie stifled a squeal and many others started at this piece of ecclesiastical theatre.

On signal the organ took a succession of deep breaths accompanied by regular wooden bumps from the footpedals. And at the first dustily-trumpeted chord the congregation rose: “Hark! the herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the new-born King, Peace on earth, and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled' —

In the silence for breath that followed, a falling pine cone clattered in the guttering. Walter saw a tangle of green branches high up in a clear pane of window. Most of the windows were frosted over with whitewash, but here and there a pane had been left clear. In one of these the square of green hung like a painting in an otherwise bare room.

“Let us pray.”

The minister's gaze wandered on a cobbled square of bent backs and bowed heads. Again the women pinched the bridges of their noses, while the men held their hands over their foreheads and looked at the floor as if shading themselves from an earthbound sun.

Billy swallowed a yawn. At the start of the prayer he had peered at a cup-hook of hair dangling on the
lace collar of his older cousin. On this he built a rapid dream of defilement: yet his cousin became someone else — only the lace and the hair remained of her — he wanted the dream to be pure-someone, but it swelled — who was she? No face — he needed a face, but not Ethel's, and he raised his hand prayer-like to disguise his hunt for other possibilities, and as he glanced around, finding nothing, he heard his amplified breath rising from the palm of his hand: a thin cooling intake of air followed by a thick expulsion. The repeated sound was hypnotic. It caused his thoughts to step back from his body, so that he saw himself as a sleeping shape of flesh. And he disliked what he saw. Not the shape itself, not the work-thickened fingers or scrubbed-clean neck, but the immobile prison his thoughts had suddenly escaped from. In that second or two he conceived the idea that other people were not so trapped, and he envied them. When he tried to stay with the idea, to discover it properly, the tone of his breath changed, flapped wetly, and abolished the spell. He fell back to noting his boots dusty from the ride — he'd been up early polishing them — and he saw again that his fingernails were getting long. So he bit them.

“Amen.”

After the children's address Mr Fox invited the younger ones to leave the church for Bible class. Douggie slipped away, and Mrs Gilchrist's hand, which seconds before had been resting on his knee, now lay flat on the empty seat. Father and son folded their arms, bumping elbows.

Mr Fox reminded the congregation that the year had been one of rich blessings. He spoke of grapes and melons, figs and honey, bread and milk — as if the produce of Palestine and the produce of Parkes were
the same. The hoped-for rains had come, but elsewhere others had not been so fortunate. He referred to distant parishes. We must think of these less fortunate places as we garner our harvest, said Mr Fox, and thereby make a storehouse for the well-being of our souls.

 

Billy's mind now wandered the district, starting far away from the hospital, then coming closer, yet never actually entering the room where his mother lay. He felt for a bruised thumbnail and pressed it till it hurt. He thought of the silver roofs of Forbes, brick chimneys, the Bible class outside gathered in the shade of the tankstand — then far-off things again. Suddenly something forced him to view his mother walking the track near Pine Creek as she loved to in spring. But he wrenched that picture aside. He saw May Armitage escorted down a rocky laneway to a spot where an overhanging pepper tree plunged the track into utter darkness. She was black and blue now, and wouldn't be kissed by choice for ages.

Ethel thought Billy knew more than he said, which was true.

The police had walked him down the lane and asked what he'd seen that night, where he'd stopped. Near the pepper tree they tried to be clever:

“Remember how dark it was. Did she run?”

“Come off it!”

He'd been unable to help because what he knew and what they wanted to know would never fit together. They wanted the culprit — who wasn't Billy. But Billy knew something all right. He had kissed May Armitage the night before she'd been bashed, and he could have
told the police why it happened and how. But that would have been about May, not the culprit.

Billy had half jokingly thought of getting Walter together with May some time, she would have been a treat for his innocent soul. The plump Baptist kindliness held surprises, though you had to be daring to track them down because she never offered a thing. When they kissed a suddenly fierce contest of limbs occurred and it took Billy a minute to realize that her cry was not “You're hurting me,” but a plea for rougher treatment. Then a light had spilt from the kitchen door of the nearby rectory. “Spot?” called an approaching voice: “Here, Spot — Spotty Spotty Spotty — Oh!”

Billy wondered about his cousins, if any bloke would be tempted to get rough with them: and decided they were too jolly. Though Ethel wanted things, and demanded them smartly enough with her sinewy body, they weren't peculiar needs like May Armitage's. Nor did they catch at some half-buried need in Billy himself. He lifted his rump from the hot seat and unpeeled his sticky trouser-bottoms. In the deepening boredom of the service his thoughts now changed direction as abruptly as a horse's swinging head: his mind galloped everywhere. He dropped Ethel and shouted himself a tall glass of beer, he swung from a rope and splashed in the Lachlan, he scrutinized May Armitage's damaged body under the sheets and studied her swollen lips as they crackled madly with an electric phrase: “Kiss me.”

Because the church encased these thoughts in its stone frame the idea of being trapped in his body came back, and he crossed and uncrossed his legs in frustration.

The cattle and sheep are finding the festive season a
little dry, said Mr Fox, so we must pray for fresh growth. The hot weather — and he unfurled a white handkerchief from the arm of his cassock and dabbed his forehead — is a burden to us all. Mrs Fox left the organ and took her seat in the front row. Her husband retreated from the prow of the pulpit and polished his spectacles on the sleeve of his gown.

He referred to notes.

The women, like a field of straw-winged butterflies, fanned their glowing throats rapidly. The men braced their shoulders as if for duty.

He spoke the text: “When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.”

 

Christmas, purred Mr Fox, is indeed a time of great rejoicing. Today we have sung carols and heard the Christmas story from the word of God Himself. Yet the festival would be without meaning if we failed to look beyond it. The annunciation and the birth, the bearing of gifts to the child, all these are wonderful in themselves, but their full importance lies in the future. Those coming events in the life of Christ, those bursts of light as he grows and the falling shadows on the road to Golgotha — these are the things that complete the meaning of Christmas. Look at Christ the Child in the old paintings. He is beckoning us with his raised hand to look at the life ahead.

Billy sank as Mr Fox spoke, sliding to a position where only his legs locked on the rung of the pew in front prevented his slipping off altogether. And at the same time Walter was raised up.

Pews creaked, and Mr Fox beckoned on behalf of a distant truth.

But suddenly he turned strange and difficult to follow. His spectacles reflected the frosted glare of a window as he steadied his head, and the effect of a brief, isolating blindness caused Walter to lose track, and then to feel mistrustful. The minister paused and lifted his chin as though listening to an instructing, inhuman voice from elsewhere. It was the same manner he adopted sometimes away from the church when you could tell he wasn't listening at all. Yet here he was asking the congregation to follow him who was following Christ. What if he was just — mad! His tense mouth pursed like a fish's … Mrs Fox half-rose from her seat as her husband manipulated his jaw, loosening a streak of foam-coloured light at one wet corner.

We do not store our grain without preparing for the next season — he leaned from the pulpit — we do not, we shall not sit down at our full tables on Wednesday unmindful of the tasks of the morrow. Therefore he proposed to look forward to a time of tribulation when God was inwardly to be called upon and blessed.

But for most this was Christmas, or near enough — no time to wrestle with the troubles of the future. Wednesday loomed, as far forward as anyone wished to look. Mr Fox pleaded with God from his lonely height while dozens of dinners sat ready in hot kitchens. Heads drooped, the old and careless dozed, the busy fans creaked right and left.

And now, well beloved father — he quoted from somewhere — what shall I say? I am taken among anguishes. Save me in this hour. Please it thee, Lord to deliver me, for I am poor and what shall I do and whither shall I go without thee.